ROD STEWART – "Baby Jane"

Jane in the video is a fearsome apparition. Though not as fearsome as the chess computer with a robot claw.

God, this one had completely wiped from the memory bank. The song is passable enough but the whole performance is horrid and, as Tom said, it’s shocking how weak Rod’s vocal is, just a throaty shout where it was once full of character. He really is the George Best of pop music.

And the old Rod would have been sinking a pint of bitter or bottle of Jack at the start of the video, not what looks like some poncey fruit cocktail in a half pint glass.

“he really is the george best of pop music”
that does seem to be the general view – even the sleeve notes (i think these ones not written by tom) on a rod compilation my mate has begin “no one in the history of popular music has more comprehensively betrayed their talent than rod stewart”!!!

maybe it’s just because i’m allergic to the faces, but to me it’s difficult to plot that much of a decline, let alone the pissing away of a huge talent. (the great) maggie mae aside, I think his seventies stuff is sort of alright, and i think this is sort of, if slightly less, alright too. also, betraying his talent seems to have left rod a pretty contented bloke, which didn’t seem to be the case with george best, however many times he trotted out the ‘where did it all go wrong?’ story.

what’s the mark btw? I’m guessing 3.

i’m slightly tempted here to argue that it was the faces — ex-mods dicking around in an ultra-laddish rockband — who had been doing the betraying, with rod’s return to fancy clubbing lifestyle a reaffirmation of earlier (anti-rock) values

but such contrarian perversity is not my style

I don’t think Rod was doing any “betraying” – that would mean I think an artist “owes” something to his/her audience or the Gods of Rock and Roll which I don’t really – he was just following the standard working class footballer/rock star route of talent = money and fame = shagging Britt Ekland/Miss World. Nice work if you can get it.

The sleeve is a tribute to Elvis’ Golden Records (aka 50,000,000 Elvis Fans can’t be wrong), only with the gold lame suit replaced with Rod’s three-piece bin liner.

A side effect of New Pop’s death was the re-emerge of Rod and Elton (I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues and I’m Still Standing were huge hits in ’83) who had been partially shut down by Punk/Post Punk/New Pop. With the old order restored, and the spirit of independence crushed (unless you count the emergence of Goth, which is maybe pop’s least assertive movement)), it was safe for them to come out of hiding. The Punk wars were truly lost… at least on TOTP. Hell, I felt betrayed!

No doubt, this was a let down after the mighty Young Turks from his previous album. I do have a soft spot for the “when I give my heart again…” section, which harks back to the white soul side of Rod (Killing Of Georgie’s coda etc), but Baby Jane is sunk for me by a particularly unpleasant kazoo-like sax sound – it sounds like it’s being played by a cartoon duck). That, and the strained verse vocals, and the fact that starting with the chorus (?) leaves it heading nowhere but that nazzzty keys/sax riff.

Still, he’s done worse. Oi’ll give it foive.

To add to Witchita’s observation at 11, I had a look at the Top Ten albums for the week this got to Number 1.

1 Police – Synchronicity
2 Michael Jackson – Thriller
3 Bowie – Let’s Dance
4 ELO – Secret Messages
5 Rod Stewart – Body Wishes
6 Mike Oldfield – Crises
7 George Benson – In Your Eyes
8 Kool & the Gang – Twice as Kool
9 Spandau Ballet – True
10 Elton John – Too Low For Zero

It’s almost as if 79-82 didn’t happen.

I’d never heard this before (at least not consciously), but I have to say I didn’t hate it. And I’m a huge fan of the Faces and Rod’s first four albums who has mostly dismissed everything he’s done since.

I mean, it’s an almost defiantly minor song, with nothing but that swinging-back-and-forth chorus to make it memorable, but I guess I just have so much affection for Rod as a vocal presence that I just smile and nod. He looks like he’s having fun, anyway. (Unlike his clearly nervous bandmates in the video.)

It’s possibly one of the weakest number ones ever.

Rod fans don’t particulalry rate it

It’s not played as a Golden Oldie that much

Most, if not all, number ones have some people that ‘still love it’

That’s the danger of artificially inflating a track by means of hype and creative marketing.

Ahem, I did like this when I was ten, if not much now. I think that it was the distinctive videographic aesthetic of the promo which attracted me most, plus the narrative appeal of the story (such as it is) of Jane, dramatically accentuated by the saxaphone motif, plus the heritage appeal of Stewart’s elder statesman status (this was starting to become a serious selling point to me and, a year later, I was getting albums by The Who and The Stones)

Indeed, I almost got a copy of this as a free top ten single with a pair of Clarks’ shoes, but by the time I persuaded my mother to take advantage of this deal, the promotion had finished.

26 years on, the most interesting thing that I can find about this is its near total lack of any afterlife. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this on the radio, or in a public place, since 1983.

‘I’m Still Standing’, however, would have been a great number one. It’s rockin’!

Um, I think the someone who “still loves it” is me. I’m a bit shocked by the negative response here, this has always been my favourite Rod Stewart song.

Course, I now feel like I’ve got to defend it, and I’m not sure I can say much more than “it’s just a good tune”. But I really do think it’s a well constructed melody, in the old fashioned “lots of stepwise movement, a few leaps followed by steps back within that leap, etc etc” sense of melody. This sort of stuff: http://www.donaldsonworkshop.com/coriakin/melody.html

I’ll accept the production has dated badly, and the performance is duff (although I generally think that of Rod’s performances anyway). But it’s still getting an 8 from me, just for the tune.

Re#19 – it’s had at least some kind of afterlife in one of 2 Many DJs As-Heard-On-Radio-Soulwax mixes, surrounded-by the electro of Miss Kittin’s Rippin Kittin.

I, too, can’t be as down on it as most people here. Both it and I’m Still Standing by Elton John seemed to be veteran artists, not exactly copying New Pop’s moves, but at least re-aquainting themselves with an unashamed, poppy approach to their music. At least a 6 from me.

It’s all right. Kind of catchy, wriggles in the head. That’s about all really: not much to say against it, not much to say for it.

“Baby Jane” suggests Bette Davis being creepily horrible to Joan Crawford. If that suggestion was intended, it sailed way wide of the mark.

And a contender for most classically-1980s over the top video. Same guy who did Duran Duran’s vids wasn’t it? Russ Mc-something.

#17 not played as a Golden Oldie that much #19 …no afterlife…
if you want to hear it at least a couple of times a day, get listening to capital gold…

i’ll also vouch for the excellence of “i’m still standing”, not least for turning the potentially revolting ‘admire me for being a survivior’ lyric into something genuinely celebratory. the video is pretty amazing too – i don’t think i’d ever seen anything so bright and colourful and sharp.

It does bring back memories of the summer of 1983 which was one of my better ones so I can’t completely dismiss it. Leaving that to one side the single does nothing for me at all. Rod’s hoary old vocal sounds like he’s on auto pilot and the contemptuous synth & sax backing is just nasty. Yet it’s annoyingly catchy – but then so is Swine Flu.

As seems to be the majority view here Elton’s ‘I’m Still Standing’ is a far superior piece of pop – not that there’s any real reason for comparing them.

I entirely agree that this is a struggle for Rod and he seems to lose interest by the time he exits, which is just as well because so had I.

I like it. It’s a fine enough pop song, if a little weak for a 3-week # 1. Along with Bowie and Elton the career resurgences were complete. Punk never happened.

Paulito @#36 Bowie being lumped in with Rod and Elton must be one of the most inane categorisations I’ve seen here. Firstly, Bowie didn’t experience a “career resurgence” in 1983 – having not lost any of his popularity in the preceding years, he didn’t need one.

I disagree. Bowie’s career had a definite commercial lag between ‘Scary Monsters’ and ‘Let’s Dance’, and though that gap was not considerable (and was punctuated by the duet with Queen), and though his artistic credibility always remained high, the ‘Let’s Dance’ album has a noticeable conformance to the slicker more pop-oriented styles of the time. Same with Elton’s ‘I’m Still Standing’ single, Rod’s ‘Baby Jane’ and Queen’s later ‘Radio Ga-Ga’. For all of them ’83 represents a kind of line in the sand in which they seemed to get back their commercial mojo – even though they’d never stopped selling – and it was thought of that way at the time.
As to my comment on Punk, I wasn’t saying that Punk wanted the likes of Bowie or Elton gone (a good few Punks had been adolescents at the height of Glam), but rather indicating that the brief years between the taking hold of New Wave in, say, late ’78, and the closing of the New Romantic era in say, late ’82 during which anything had seemed possible (largely created by the do-it-yourself ethos of Punk, and the record company confusion over what was good and what wasn’t that went with it) was now over. The more cynical financial drives of Thatcher’s Britain were giving way to the Miami Vice deck-shoed ‘Let’s make lot’s of money’ attitude of ‘New Pop’ with the public-pleasing formulas that went with it. And incidentally, I don’t say that strictly in the negative sense; I, like many people – enjoyed it all. I would suggest that if – as you said – Bowie only first showed signs of jumping the shark with Let’s Dance, it was because it was the first record in a number of years in which he had clearly approached a Producer with the mindset of ‘Let’s make something that will sell a lot’. It is, of course, just my opinion, but I hope that clarifies what I meant.

edited: nevermind

@37: Fair enough, I see your point now!